


Teen Idle

by Haurvatat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eating Disorder, Gen, Mentions of Suicide, Moirails, Mommy!Kanaya, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 06:08:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haurvatat/pseuds/Haurvatat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doomed timeline dream bubble Karkats keep winding up dead - suicide.  Everyone's been treating Karkat differently because of it and it's driving him up the wall enough that he's having some very uncharacteristic thoughts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teen Idle

_Wish I’d been a_  
 _Wish I’d been a teen, teen idle_  
 _Wish I’d been a Prom Queen fighting for the title_  
 _Instead of being sixteen I’m burning up a Bible_  
 _Feeling super super super suicidal_  
 _The wasted years_  
 _The wasted youth_  
 _The pretty lies_  
 _The ugly truth_  
 _The day has come where I have died_  
 _Only to find I’ve come alive_

The first time it happens, they’re all convinced it’s a weird fluke. A particularly doomed timeline in which more shit went wrong than usual, thus leading to the result in question.

Then it happens again.

And again.

And after the sixth time or so, it starts being genuinely concerning. Not all of those timelines were so exceptionally doomed that… Well. For Karkat, it’s just annoying. They’re all giving him weird, concerned looks sometimes, as though he’s in the exact same situation as any of those dream-bubble Karkats were. It’s not his fault they went and killed themselves.

Karkat has never been a fan of Past Karkat. Or Future Karkat. Or even Current Karkat very much, come to think of it. The point is not that he hates himself. The point is that he is fully aware of the dumb decisions Past or Future versions of him might want to make, and as a result has learned to refrain from the more pan-dead choices out of sheer necessity. He doesn’t want to kill himself. Much. The few times he’s thought of it (not that he would ever mention it to anyone at all ever, lest they give him more of those damn pitying looks), he’s always called what the humans would term a “flag on the play”. He’s learned to identify which decisions he would regret immediately. Suicide is definitely one of them. Well, he would regret it if he were alive to regret it. Which, having outlived the other-timeline Karkats, he has. The point stands.

Again, what he can’t stand are the looks. Rose, for once, doesn’t attempt to psychoanalyse him. He suspects she might be feeling out of her depth. She’s actually scared she might make things worse. She thinks he’s got real problems, that he’s so mentally fragile that an untrained hand could shatter him. It’s fucking obnoxious. Dave tries to pretend like it doesn’t bother him, but he always gets a little stiff when Karkat’s taking part in a conversation. The Mayor is fucking awesome as usual. Then again, he doesn’t really interact with dream bubble people as much as the others. Kanaya… well, Kanaya is at least trying to do something, even if Karkat doesn’t want anything done at all. She makes it damn clear to him, multiple times, that if he’s ever got anything he wants to talk about, she’s there for him. It’s human-motherly and he hates it, but at least she’s not trying to sweep it under the rug. It’s also nice to have someone take charge instead of waddle about like flightless featherbeasts with their heads cut off. Gamzee never shows up anymore. God knows what shenanigans that clown asshole managed to get up to, but odds are good he never asked anybody why all these dream bubble Karkats were dead. Terezi tries very, very hard to hide things from him. He’s noticed. They were supposed to be friends, but when she has her problems (and from the vast quantities of Faygo she’s consumed and the trousers she’s forsaken everywhere, she’s got them all right), she refuses to come to him.

Actually, all of them do that. Generally, he wouldn’t expect Rose or Dave or anybody to come to him with their personal sob-stories, but he knows damn well that they’re avoiding giving him any bad news whatsoever. He’s not depressed, and if he were, the relative levels of good versus bad news wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. But no, they skirt around him anyway. What he hates is being treated like he’s fragile. Every last one of them is doing it. He’s not some fucking victim. Not even to the obtuse machinations of his own thinkpan.

The dumbest thing of all had yet to come: with more time to himself and with reminders of the stupid thing every single time he interacted with anyone, Karkat started thinking more about it. Not like, I’m going to go out and kill myself, or even, It might be nice to hurt myself, but more along the lines of, I wonder what it would be like to shut up all of these imbeciles forever and just not have to deal with any of their shit. It might be nice. Stuff like that. Not really a desire to hurt himself at all. Not a desire to die. Just to escape, if anything. What was already a shitty situation was made shittier by all of their misguided attempts to be sensitive. It was unbearable.

And sometimes his eyes would catch on certain things longer than others.

Knives, for example.

He’d placed his sickles in the care of Kanaya with a loud and pointed mention of his perfect health and sanity (just loud enough for the humans to flinch in guilt) and the desire to prove as much, so it wasn’t like he could gaze longingly at their blades in private.

The kitchen knives, on the other hand, sometimes catch his gaze just long enough for somebody to notice. At which point Karkat inevitably blunders about something loud and distracting in hopes of wiping the incident from the witness’s memory. It never works, but he gets points for trying, right?

He can’t help it. What would it be like to slide one over a wrist? Karkat has the precision of a painter with a blade in hand, even if his art skills are somewhat… lacking. Well, that was with his right hand. Alternian society was sort of pissy about lefties, and Karkat had avoided giving them all one more thing to be biased about when it came to him. He could totally draw. He just didn’t let anybody see him use his left hand like he wanted to. Whatever. Not the point. The point is that he is certain he could draw blood without doing any serious damage. A tiny flesh wound. Just enough to feel that delicious prickle of pain.

Okay, that sounds crazy, but isn’t. He’d been picking at the skin on his legs and arms and chest for sweeps. With razor sharp claws, it wasn’t like it was hard. He knows shedding his own blood was and is fucking stupid. What if someone sees? But then, at the same time, he can’t stop. It isn’t that he really likes the pain. When he controls every aspect of the pain, it isn’t pain. It’s just an intense rush of sensation. No pain, just broken skin, blood, and elation. Complete control of a situation. Except for the part where he is addicted to it. There is power in making himself bleed, and the rush he gets when he does it isn’t half bad, either. These days, he doesn’t feel in control of much anything, so he’s been doing it a little more frequently than usual. He knows in theory why it is bad, sure. Karkat just can’t convince his fingers to get with the program.

How much of a step-up can a knife be, really? Sometimes he gers really good shivers thinking about it. Those shivers creep him out. He shouldn’t get off on this sort of thing. It’s nuts. Barmy. Lalonde would have a field day if she weren’t busy playing the skittish mouse around him and his supposed mental afflictions. The urge persists. He ignores it when he can.

Then they pass through a dream bubble in which there is a suicided-Karkat ghost. He isn’t able to keep himself from asking what it was like to die.

“Well, for the fuck-all good it did me, I’m not sure it was worth it. I’m still stuck with these imbeciles,” Ghost Karkat says.

“What do you mean you’re not sure? Still some doubts, or what?”

The ghost shrugs. “I have to admit, for all of a few minutes… I was free, man. While you’re in the process of dying, knowing you’ve only got so much limited time before you’re gone? It’s freeing like nothing else. No bullshit with trying to fix everybody’s sessions. No more trying-to-save-the-universes-because-who-the-fuck-else-will kind of shit. And just this feeling that everything’s going to be okay because none of it’s your problem any more. And then you wake up a ghost and everything is still your problem and nothing’s changed except you’re twenty times as fucking useless as you were before. Although at least you’re not a damn liability to them dead.”

“Huh? The fuck does that mean?”

“You’ll figure it out soon enough,” Ghost Karkat says cryptically.

He does.

He tries to get them to train to fight Jack when this stupid fucking meteor eventually slows down enough for him to catch up and try to slaughter them all. Again. He’s got precious little in terms of warriors to work with, especially when all of them regard their asses as a fashionable headpiece (except maybe Kanaya, but even she has her asshat moments), but that’s not going to stop him from doing everything he can with what he’s got.

And then Karkat realizes that nobody wants to spar with him.

They’re all fucking worried that this is a ruse he’s using to get other people to hurt him and pretend like it’s an accident. He can see it written on their guilty little faces. Nobody wants to be the unwitting perpetrator in his plan-that-doesn’t-exist. This is fucking stupid. How do they expect to get anything done like this? Do they think this is all some kind of fucking game? It is, yeah, but fuck technicalities. They know what’s at stake here, and they’re still treating training like it’s optional.

Thusly, Karkat also realizes that his presence and questionable sanity has reduced his entire company to utter redundancy. Uselessness. He’s holding them back. They’re all going to die like this. And he understands why so many of his other selves decided that there was fuck-all to live for. It’s a no-win scenario in that if he lives, not only does he die anyway, but he ends up taking his friends with him. If he kills himself… well, generally it doesn’t do much good, but in almost every dream bubble he’s come across with a dead Karkat, his friends are still alive. Or, in Kanaya’s case, undead.

He doesn’t know what to do. Karkat is spending more and more time alone in his respite block, pretending none of his problems exist, except that they totally do and invade his every waking thought. He doesn’t know what he wants or how to fix any of the crap he’s fucked up over the sweeps. He’s got no options except to die helplessly at the hands (paws?) of a murder-crazed Jack Noir, and if he escapes that fucker, then he’s still got a murder-crazed Lord English to look forward to. Goodie. Point is, Karkat fucking hates being the victim, and no matter how his think pan constructs scenario after scenario, he ends up being one. Another shitheel falling in a battle he knew was hopeless from the start. He wants to be in control. To choose his own death. To have a little god damn dignity and pride. But suicide keeps feeling like a coward’s way of bailing on his friends and leaving them behind in the fine mess he’s gotten them all into in the first place. Way to go, jackass. Friend of the Sweep Award material right there. So after scrapping that thought soundly, he resolves to pretend that fine mess of a thought process never happened. This is getting to be a bad habit.

Karkat isn’t sure at what point he stops eating. It’s gradual at first. He just doesn’t have an appetite. He’ll nibble at some things a bit, then get bored or whatever and just walk away. It still tastes good and all that; he just can’t fathom why he would want to eat it. He barely gets an entire meal a day for a good while. They don’t seem to notice because he’ll abduct something from the lab kitchen to his respite block and then take maybe a bite out of it when he gets there. They assume he’s eaten the entire thing, even if about 95% of it actually got thrown away because he left it out too long. Logically, Karkat knows that he should be eating. He doesn’t feel hungry. The thought of eating food that’s just going to sit in his gut like a ball of slime is repugnant. It gets to the point where he’ll have food in his mouth and his protein chute will utterly refuse to let it pass, forcing him to spit it out. Why bother when he feels fine? He’ll eat when he’s hungry. He just isn’t at the moment. He expects it to pass quickly. It doesn’t. It barely matters, he tells himself, when he almost never leaves his respite block these days. What could he possibly need extra energy for? He’s not exerting himself left and right. Maybe if he did, his body would remember that it’s supposed to be getting hungry.

So, being the incredibly ill-advised creature he is, Karkat bends a few of the heavier coat hangers and practices with them like they’re his sickles. He really shouldn’t have given them to Kanaya. Inevitably, he looks like a fucking doofus, even moreso because they’re still too light and he’s off balance as a result. Then he whirls around too fast at just the wrong angle or in just the wrong way, or maybe he just plain tries to use his muscles too much, and he falls. His legs crumple beneath him and the air leaves his vascular system. Nothing hurts except maybe his knees where they slammed into the ground, but otherwise, he’s okay. So why can’t he move? His blood freezes in his veins. If he still did shit like blaming Past Karkat for Current Karkat’s problems, he’d be having a world-class pissing contest right now. It’s all he can do just to lie there and draw in breath, so that’s what he does. He expects his strength to come back at some point. Then he should be able to push himself off the ground and pretend this whole embarrassing fiasco/blunder/piece of shit excuse for a whatever didn't happen. Except that doesn’t happen. He just stays on the ground. Breathing. Waiting. Getting considerably more nervous the longer this whole getting-back-on-his-feet thing takes. It occurs to him no fewer than eighty-seven times that the others are used to him spending a very long time alone by himself and that no one would think to come check on him for… maybe a day or two. By then, he’s probably going to be dead. The only thing he can rely on at this point is Lalonde’s sketchy Seer powers, and given Karkat’s exposure to them, they don’t inspire a fuck-ton of confidence.

At least he has just enough strength to push the stupid coat hanger sickles in his the rest of his pile so nobody ever sees them. He has no desire to appear that imbecilic as a corpse or otherwise. “Here lies Karkat Vantas: the fucking douchebag who screwed around with coat hangers and died because he forgot to fucking eat. How he lived this long, we will never know.” Ugh. Egbert is supposed to be the King Dork. When did Karkat decide to run for Prime Minister?

He lets his eyes close. It’s not like they’re going to do him any good. Maybe if he gets a little rest and goes to sleep, he’ll have a little more strength when he wakes up. Maybe enough to get him to the kitchen. It’s a pathetically small hope, but it’s enough.

The grate over the air vent rattles. Oh, fuck it. Gamzee, here to finally cull him properly. Well, maybe. The guy’s been keeping to himself all this time, and Karkat figures that if Gamzee really wanted his meteor-mates dead, it wouldn’t have taken him this long to make a move. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to shift into unconsciousness. If he’s going to die, he’s going to do it as peacefully as possible. Vriska would gag, but… fuck her.

Before Karkat really has time to comprehend what’s going on, there’s a hand in his hair, rubbing behind his horns and getting into the scalp in just the perfect way. It’s soft, but firm, and loving. Karkat can’t help the faint purr from deep in his chest.

“That’s right, my main motherfucker. Palebro’s gotta get some motherfuckin’ sleep. You just get your relax on. I’m not gonna leave you.”

The last of the tension leaves Karkat, and with the hand in his hair and soft reassurances in his auricular spongeclots, he falls asleep.

When he wakes up, Kanaya is by his side. He’s in the infirmary. Of fucking course. And there’s a tube sticking out of his arm. Isn’t that just perfect. Now they know what a fucking moron he is and they’ve seen his bloody firsthand. He knows it’s always been the worst-kept secret ever, but knowing something and seeing it are two very different things. Like how he’d always known that Eridan was capable of killing, but it hadn’t sunk in until he’d seen him actually do it. But Kanaya isn’t looking at him with disgust – and he’d see the slightest traces of it in her face. Even if she did at one point feel that way and then got over it, there’d be some measure of shame there, and there isn’t any. There might be a little guilt, though. He can’t figure out if that’s there because she was grossed out by his blood at first or maybe because she feels responsible. She might. It’s the sort of human motherly thing she would do. She looks out for him and always has in a weird way. He can understand a little bit of what she might be thinking on that count. Enough bad shit’s happened with him as leader, and he gets that whole feeling of responsibility. He really does.

Before he can get a word out, Kanaya notices he’s awake and looking at her.

“Karkat?”

He nods, well aware that a follow-up speech has most likely been prepared.

“You know I need to ask you. Why would you do this? What pushed you to do this?” she asks, hurt in her eyes. “I thought you knew you could come to me.”

“Did,” Karkat mutters.

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Didn’t know I was in trouble. It’s not like I did this to myself on purpose, Kanaya. I thought I was okay, and then… Well, then I found out that I wasn’t so okay.”

“What does that mean? You have to tell me, Karkat. I can’t help you if I have no notion of what is going on.”

He sighs. “I can’t eat. I try. Swear to god, I try. I just can’t make myself do it. I’ll maybe get a bite or two in before everything just closes up and won’t budge. I don’t want to eat, but I kept trying anyway. I promise you, I wasn’t trying to pull this kind of shit on purpose. Do you think I wanted to look that fucking stupid? Getting rescued by a freak murder clown? Yeah, that totally made my day.”

She looks a little perturbed. “What exactly happened with Gamzee?”

Karkat falters. “I… I was about to pass out or something and he got into my room. Helped me fall asleep. I’m guessing he went and got you guys and that’s how you found me?”

Her face screws up in a way that makes you think she isn’t quite sure how to phrase something. “In a manner of speaking. He left a trail of blood to your door. At first I thought he might have killed you, but then we found that you had no injuries to speak of… I didn’t know what to think. But if he did it specifically to get help…” Her lips purse, but her eyes do a weird, almost wistful thing. “…Maybe there’s hope for Gamzee yet.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” Karkat says, a small smile on his face. For once, it feels like a regular conversation. Maybe she was freaking out earlier a little, but she’s calmed down. Whatever drama there is in their exchange is perfectly justified given that he’s immobile with tubes coming out of his fucking arm. Also by the fact that she totally thought he’d been butchered for a minute, there, and then thought that he’d tried to starve himself to death. She’s being pretty cool about this, and Karkat appreciates the hell out of it.

“You’ve been avoiding us,” Kanaya says bluntly. “If you’d been a bit more sociable, we might not have needed our resident mirthful psychopath to get you assistance.”

“Maybe if you all stopped looking at me like I’m about to do and goddamn fouetté off the handle into the abyss of space and suicide, then maybe I’d delight in your company a little more than I do,” he spits. Shit. He didn’t mean to do that. Kanaya’s been relatively cool about the situation. He shouldn’t be venting at her. Luckily, she doesn’t seem to take offense.

“You’ve been getting strange looks?”

No going back. She’s opened the floodgates now. “To start. They look at me like I’m some kind of fragile fucking doll made out of spun sugar and there’s a bomb two inches from me ready to go off. They act different around me. They don’t know how to treat me as a person anymore. They look at me and see a fucking victim. They see some emotionally and psychological fragile nook-licker who can’t breathe and wipe his ass at the same time, but they’re so fucking scared of making an imaginary issue worse, they back away from me! I don’t have fucking troll ebola! Or human ebola, for that matter. If they keep pulling back from me, then tell me, O Wise One, why the hell should I bother sticking around? If they aren’t really there anymore, what reason to I have to stay? So yeah, I shut myself up in my respite block. Nobody made me feel like an asshole or a pathetic wriggler in there. If I was alone, it was going to be my fucking decision and not because people abandoned me the minute something started freaking them out. And you know what? Seeing them freaked out? Made me freak out. You know, I never considered suicide. Like, even once. Not even in passing. Then, all of a sudden, all these guys start treating me like it’s a real, honest-to-god option, and I start wondering if maybe I’ve missed something about myself. Maybe it was an option? What are they seeing in me that I never did? Is my life really so horrible? Do they really think I would? Do they think maybe that I should? How much do they really need me, Kanaya? If they keep treating me like a god damn invalid, current state of things notwithstanding, then we can’t be a cohesive team. If we’re not a team, we’re all going to die. How certain are you that I’m not holding them back? What if they were always right to be worried about me? What if this whole shithive clusterfuck is my fault and not an overreaction of theirs? How do I know, Kanaya? Answer: I don’t. But you know what? There’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I don’t want to die. I’m not fucking going to. Maybe if people’s heads were loosened slightly from the firm grip their anal sphincters have on them, we could get somewhere. Am I qualified, according to them, to make that argument? Fuck no! So really, what was I going to do? I stay shut up in my room to prove I can do just fine with no supervision. Because that plan went so fucking well. If everyone could just quit judging the ever-pitying fuck out of me…”

“Yes?” Kanaya looks a little tentative about speaking.

“…Yeah, I don’t really have a follow-up for that one. You get my point, though. You weren’t as bad about it as the others. Not anywhere near as bad. I mean, it would have been one thing if just the humans did it. They don’t know me as well as they think they do, and definitely not as long as you’ve known me. But Terezi did it, too. I think that’s what knocked me for a fucking loop,” Karkat says.

Kanaya takes one of Karkat’s hands in her own. She’s warm, pleasantly so. “I can talk to them on your behalf, if you like. Tell them what you told me just now.”

Hope swells. “I don’t have to deal with them?”

“Not until they’ve made appropriate adjustments to their behavior, no. If that is what you want.”

“It sounds pretty cowardly to hide here and let you take care of all my shit for me,” Karkat says.

She shakes her head. “You’ve dealt with quite enough. I think you’d do well to dodge this particular conversational bullet. Besides, you said it yourself: they might not accept it comes straight from your mouth. They’ll think you are simply on the defensive about problems you really do have, instead of what it is: a gross overreaction on their parts.”

Karkat sighs and gives her a tired but genuine grin. She smiles back.

“I missed that smile of yours, you know. I can’t recall having seen it much.”

“Yeah, and I can’t remember smiling much, either. No, but seriously, Maryam. You’re fucking awesome.”

She blushes jade, spine straightening from a hint of pride. “I’ll not disagree with your sound judgment. I will, however, ask you to eat your vegetables in the future.”

The disgusted face he gives her speaks for itself.

**Author's Note:**

> The morbid is fascinating, and unfortunately, the closer it is, the more of a reality that fascination can become. The more you think about suicide, the more it's always there in the back of your mind, waiting for you to poke at it like a loose tooth. When others convince you that this is unnatural, sometimes bad things result. I can also personally vouch for Karkat's issues with eating. When I get stressed for any reason, I all but stop eating completely. Once I forgot to eat for two and half days straight because a paper was due, and this was at college where you had to walk a fair distance to obtain food. I barely made it there, I was walking so sluggishly. You'd be surprised how quickly your energy leaves you as soon as you stand up and try to do something. It is not an experience I would recommend to anyone. Collapsing on the floor is not fun.


End file.
